Young Folks' History of Rome eBook

When his term of office was over, the most pressing
thing to be done was to put down the Cilician pirates.
In the angle formed between Asia Minor and Syria,
with plenty of harbors formed by the spurs of Mount
Taurus, there had dwelt for ages past a horde of sea
robbers, whose swift galleys darted on the merchant
ships of Tyre and Alexandria; and now, after the ruin
of the Syrian kingdom, they had grown so rich that
their state galleys had silken sails, oars inlaid
with ivory and silver, and bronze prows. They
robbed the old Greek temples and the Eastern shrines,
and even made descents on the Italian cities, besides
stopping the ships which brought wheat from Sicily
and Alexandria to feed the Romans.

To enable Pompeius to crush them, authority was given
him for three years over all the Mediterranean and
fifty miles inland all round, which was nearly the
same thing as the whole empire. He divided the
sea into thirteen commands, and sent a party to fight
the pirates in each; and this was done so effectually,
that in forty days they were all hunted out of the
west end of the gulf, whither he pursued them with
his whole force, beat them in a sea-fight, and then
besieged them; but, as he was known to be a just and
merciful man, they came to terms with him, and he
scattered them about in small colonies in distant cities,
so that they might cease to be mischievous.

[Illustration: COAST OF TYRE.]

In the meantime, the war with Mithridates had broken
out again, and Lucius Lucullus, who had been consul
after Pompeius, was fighting with him in the East;
but Lucullus did not please the Romans, though he met
with good success, and had pushed Mithridates so hard
that there was nothing left for Pompeius but to complete
the conquest, and he drove the old king beyond Caucasus,
and then marched into Syria, where he overthrew the
last of the Seleucian kings, Antiochus, and gave him
the little kingdom of Commagene to spend the remainder
of his life in, while Syria and Phoenicia were made
into a great Roman province.

Under the Maccabees, Palestine had struggled into
being independent of Syria, but only by the help of
the Romans, who, as usual, tried to ally themselves
with small states in order to make an excuse for making
war on large ones. There was now a great quarrel
between two brothers of the Maccabean family, and
one of them, Hyrcanus, came to ask the aid of Pompeius.
The Roman army marched into the Holy Land, and, after
seizing the whole country, was three months besieging
Jerusalem, which, after all, it only took by an attack
when the Jews were resting on the Sabbath day.
Pompeius insisted on forcing his way into the Holy
of Holies, and was very much disappointed to find
it empty and dark. He did not plunder the treasury
of the Temple, but the Jews remarked that, from the
time of this daring entrance, his prosperity seemed
to fail him. Before he left the East, however,
old Mithridates, who had taken refuge in the Crimea,
had been attacked by his own favorite son, and, finding
that his power was gone, had taken poison; but, as
his constitution was so fortified by antidotes that
it took no effect, he caused one of his slaves to
kill him.